Spritzer/Gardenhose Streaming API Sampling Rate Changes

As some of you have noticed, we've tuned down the sampling rates in the Spritzer and Gardenhose roles of the Streaming API.

One of our goals in providing the Spritzer stream was to provide a significant sample size that wouldn't require heroic coding efforts to consume. With the steadily increasing growth rate of tweet throughput, we've reconfigured the this stream to continue with this easy-to-consume intention. Spritzer is now sampling at a rate of 1% rather than 5% of total Firehose output.

Likewise, we'll be adjusting the sampling rate of Gardenhose to accomodate the strong growth rate as needed, as we've noted in the past within the Streaming API documentation (now found at http://bit.ly/streaming-docs ).

Sampling proportions are subject to continuous unannounced refinement. Our goal is to provide useful low-latency samples without overwhelming clients or incurring excessive delivery cost. In particular, we reserve the right to alter the sampling proportion as overall traffic grows to keep the sampled feeds practical.